Facebook’s Public Figure Limitations

I have been talking with some people lately that are considered “Public Figures” on Facebook because they have reached that magic number over 5000 friends and were forced to either stop taking friend requests or to convert their profiles over to “Public Figures”. Let me start out by saying that for most people that fall into this category (celebrities) the problem I am fixing to outline is not a big deal, but for the handful that are affected by it, this can be a serious frustration.

When a user converts their account to a Public Figure on Facebook they basically are becoming a “Page” where their friends are actually converted to “fans” or “likes”. If you manage a page on Facebook for your business or organization you are probably already aware that there are some limitations as to what a page can do. For the most part, a page can only operate inside Facebook by posting links, status updates, photos, and videos to their own wall. Granted, the page, or public profile, can interact with their fans on their own wall by responding to comments, etc., but that pretty much sums up what they are allowed to do. Again, for most celebrities or brands out there, this is probably okay, but let’s say you are a “Public Profile” but still would like to interact with your “friends” or “fans” by posting messages on their walls, etc., you no longer have this ability like you would if you were still a normal user, or “Profile”.

As brands become more and more involved in social media marketing, I can’t help but believe that Facebook will eventually implement something to allow for them to eventually post messages or respond to status updates from their fans at some point in the future. For celebrities or “Public Profiles” that use social media as a tool to interact with their friends, or fan base, on a daily basis, these limitations present some serious frustrations. I am presently working with two individuals that have public profiles that are extremely unhappy with these limitations and would love for Facebook to do something about this pretty quickly so they can get back to engaging their fan base like they use to with their standard profiles.

Any Potential Workarounds?

I have thought about some possible workarounds for this situation and haven’t been able to come up with anything of value other than setting up an entirely different profile and friending a limited amount of people that you want to engage and then unfriend them when you decide to engage others. Keeping an eye on the magic number of friends and making sure that it remains below 5000. This obviously is a lot of work and probably more of a headache than it’s worth.

Another potential solution, and I haven’t completely ruled this out as an option yet, is setting up a Facebook Profile for the user, and then establishing a group, “friends of John Doe” for example. John Doe, our celebrity or public figure, would be one of the administrators for the group and he / she could interact with as many people as he wanted without some of the limitations of a page, but at the end of the day he / she is still back to square one when it comes to posting messages on group members walls, they have to be friends in most cases to be able to interact.

• I’m just curious, has anyone else ran into this issue before?
• What solution or workaround were you able to use? 
• When will Facebook address this issue?